HOUSEHOLD-ELECTRICITY SCALE
A data center
is a whole city.
The average American uses about 12 kWh of electricity per day at home, or roughly 4,437 kWh per year (EIA). This visualization converts each data center's annual electricity use into a population equivalent, then matches it to the closest U.S. city, state, or combination of states. The data center footprint is placed at true scale over satellite imagery for comparison.
—
true scale ▭ Whole place
zoomed out
METHOD & CAVEATS
People equivalent = capacity (MW) × 8,760 h × 0.8 utilization ÷ 4,437 kWh, EIA's 2020 per-capita residential electricity (retail electricity sold to homes ÷ U.S. population). It answers "how many people's household electricity does this one building use?", not "what share of the whole grid." Operating sites (0.3–1.6 GW) are matched to a U.S. city; planned campuses (4.7–9.7 GW) run 7–15 million people, larger than any U.S. city, so they are matched to a state, or a pair of adjacent states where that fits better. Each place is used once, so every data center gets a different example.
Per-capita residential is an average. An all-electric house in Phoenix uses several times a Manhattan apartment. Capacities are cited from the Cleanview U.S. data-center database; planned campuses are shown at full announced build-out (years TBD) and may never be finished at that scale. Floor areas are rough estimates (2,500 ft²/MW) used only to size the on-map square; at state scale it is about one pixel, which is the point.
The water tab uses a different denominator and a much weaker evidence base, so it is built and cited separately. See how the water number is built above.
SOURCES & VINTAGE
- Data-center capacity
- Cleanview · U.S. data-center database · compiled September 2026
- Household electricity
- 4,437 kWh per person per year · U.S. EIA, 2020 (latest published per-capita residential)
- Household water
- 82 gallons per person per day · USGS Circular 1441, 2015 domestic deliveries
- Cooling water model
- Site WUE bands by cooling technology · LBNL 2024, Siddik et al. 2021, operator disclosures · full framework and sources
- City & state population
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year via Census Reporter (2019–2023 for cities and states; 2020–2024 for the water-comparison towns)
- Place outlines
- OpenStreetMap, Census TIGER 2023 place polygons, and PublicaMundi us-states.json, simplified · retrieved September 2026
- Satellite imagery
- Esri World Imagery (Maxar, Earthstar Geographics)